Yuval Ne'eman

Yuval Ne'eman, who has died aged 80, was a pioneer of Israel's acquisition of nuclear technology, a founder of its space programme and a fanatical ideologue who led Tehiya (Renaissance) the most obdurately rightwing party on the legal political spectrum. Before he became Israel's first science minister in 1982, Ne'eman's research into subatomic particles opened new vistas in theoretical physics.

Ne'eman founded Tehiya in 1979 to protest against Israel's peace treaty with Egypt, which entailed returning the Sinai peninsula. In 1982 he camped out in the northern Sinai settlement of Yamit until just before the Likud government demolished it. Later that year he was the only cabinet minister to advocate integrating into Israel, Sidon and all of Lebanon up to the Litani river. Motivated by secular patriotism rather than messianic religiosity, he opposed ceding any of Gaza or the West Bank.

Less well known was his espionage work - although Frederick Forsyth dropped a heavy hint by naming the central character "Ne'eman" in The Odessa File. By the early 1960s the real Ne'eman was deputy head of Aman, Israeli military intelligence, and a graduate of Paris's Advanced School for War Studies. He created a database into which all intelligence information was funnelled, and invented the bugs that, smuggled into Egyptian-controlled Sinai, yielded the data that helped destroy Egypt's air force on the ground in June 1967. Thanks to Ne'eman, Israeli spies eavesdropped on communi- cation between President Nasser and King Hussein . One soldier intercepted enemy army radio channels, impersonated an Egyptian officer, and led a tank battalion into a prisoner of war camp.

Ne'eman was born in Tel Aviv, the grandson of one of the city's founders. After a few years in Port Said, Egypt, he returned to Tel Aviv where his parents, Gedalia and Tzipora, ran a pumping station. Yuval finished school at the Hertzliya Gymnasium, aged 15. That same year, 1940, he joined the Haganah (Labour Zionist underground) and began harrying British troops. He was a deputy battalion commander and Tel Aviv operations chief during the 1948 war. In 1951 he married Latvian-born Devorah Rubinstein.

During a 12-year military career Ne'eman commanded the prestigious Givati Brigade, and headed the Israel Defence Force's planning department, where he helped create Israel's mobilisation system and reservist-based army. Clandestine diplomatic assignments included, in July 1956, negotiating with French security services, trading intelligence on Egyptian movements around Suez, and the anti-colonial insurrection in Algeria, for French tanks and nuclear expertise.

Armed with a degree in chemical and electrical engineering from Haifa Technion, he served on Israel's Nuclear Energy commission (1952-1961), and for the next two years was scientific director of the small Nahal Soreq nuclear reactor. While Israel's military attaché in London (1958-62) he studied at Imperial College under the Nobel Prize winner, Abdus Salam. When President Kennedy quizzed Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion about Israeli nuclear intentions, Ne'eman drafted his replies. Kennedy sent scientists to inspect the Dimona nuclear complex, but Ne'eman showed them only non-sensitive parts of the facility.

Ne'eman rejoined a Likud-led coalition in 1990 and again became science minister. But he left in January 1992, citing the "mortal danger" presented by a nascent peace process. It was a Pyrrhic victory: Tehiya was wiped out at the polls, and Ne'eman retired from politics. Most Israelis deemed his views lunatic and often repulsive. As army supremo Moshe Dayan's adjutant in the early 1950s he devised plans for attacking Damascus, Amman, Saudi oilfields and Tripoli in Lebanon. During the first intifada he mooted expelling a West Bank refugee camp to Lebanon. He openly sympathised with Jewish terrorists who tried to kill three Palestinian mayors in 1984.

Ne'eman had significant scientific achievements. Haifa Technion colleagues say Ne'eman discovered the "quark", and in 1969, Ne'eman was awarded an Israel prize for contributions to science. By then he had founded Tel Aviv University's physics and astronomy department. He co-authored The Particle Hunters, which, published in English in 1986, the Times Literary Supplement hailed as "the best guide to quantum physics at present available". In 1983 he established the Israel Space Agency, and headed it until shortly before his death.

His wife, Devorah, children, Anath and Teddy, survive him.

· Yuval Ne'eman, physicist, intelligence officer and politician, born May 14 1925; died April 26 2006.